Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Seminal work from the father of economics, 25 May 2007
Nobody seriously involved in economics can do without this exhaustive work, originally published in five volumes as An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. This classic is a pragmatic and accessible milestone in the history of economics. Its author, Adam Smith, is woven into every economics textbook. However, Smith's theories, which today often are recounted mostly in fragments, frequently incorrectly, reveal their entire social and economic innovative power only in context. Smith burst onto the scene at a time when absolutist national states monopolized the world's precious metal reserves and tried to increase their own wealth through stringent export policies. These states were motivated by an entirely new concept about national wealth: that it stemmed from the work of the country's people, not from gold. Based on that idea, economic markets should balance themselves as if guided by an "invisible hand," impelled by each individual's self-interest. The state has to provide only an orderly framework and specific public goods and services. Even though Smith's image of idealized economic and social harmony may have developed a few cracks over the course of time, his ideas have inspired many well-known economists during the past 250 years, including David Ricardo, Vilfredo Pareto, Friedrich August von Hayek and Milton Friedman. We highly recommend this seminal work.
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
An excellent reference, but if you want to know about Smith buy a history book, 18 May 2006
There is I'm afraid, no way to get round it, this book is spectacularly dull, an entire section of the appendix is devoted to a bountiful herring catch. I can't therefore imagine that any but the most deranged right wing economists are going to sit down and read it from cover to cover. However I find it's always useful to have a copy of the original work I want to refer to even if I primarily work from other books based on it. Furthermore this edition is under half the price of most copies you'll find so if like me you think this book will spend the vast majority of it's time sitting on the shelf gathering dust it makes sense to buy this one.
If you want to know about Smith it might actually be a far better idea to just buy a book commenting on him than to get his actual work. Most of this stuff is now basic economic theory, so if you have studied economics to any degree you really won't find anything you don't already know. Smith only really makes sense in the context of his time, when he coined the phrase division of labour it was innovative, now it seems like old hat. Books like the Worldly Philosophers (I'm sure there are plenty of others out there but It's one I've read and enjoyed), not only explain Smith well, but show how his theory was expanded upon by later economists. I'd therefore recommend this particular edition of 'Wealth of Nations', but I don't think the book itself will hold much interest for anyone who isn't studying Smith in a very in depth way.
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Buy the UK edition of
The Wealth of Nations: Books
I-III
(7)
£18.04
(38)
£6.99
(6)
£8.00
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